Turns out all I needed to do to get the game to run, was install v1.13, which was what I was intending to do anyway. However after doing this, the game ran really laggy. To fix this, you:

Quote:

The solution:
...is to make JA2 engine run on WineD3D instead of regular DirectX. WineD3D is a component of Wine and is generally used to run Windows apps on non-Win systems, but can also be used on Windows.

How to do that:
1) Download wined3d.exe from http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
2) Don't run the program! instead, extract it's contents with 7Zip or somesuch http://www.7-zip.org/download.html
3) Copy ddraw.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll from extracted $SYSWIN folder into the root folder of your JA2 installation (e.g. C:\Games\Jagged Alliance 2 Gold\)
4) Run the game. It may take a bit longer to start
5) Enjoy one of the best games ever in as high FPS as your hardware can handle

You should delete point 4 in your readme file and include it in point 3. You cant set your desktop to 16 bit color mode in Windows 8. The only thing you can do is to configure the compatibility settings of an application to 16 bit color mode.

Turns out all I needed to do to get the game to run, was install v1.13, which was what I was intending to do anyway. However after doing this, the game ran really laggy. To fix this, you:

Quote:

The solution:
...is to make JA2 engine run on WineD3D instead of regular DirectX. WineD3D is a component of Wine and is generally used to run Windows apps on non-Win systems, but can also be used on Windows.

How to do that:
1) Download wined3d.exe from http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
2) Don't run the program! instead, extract it's contents with 7Zip or somesuch http://www.7-zip.org/download.html
3) Copy ddraw.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll from extracted $SYSWIN folder into the root folder of your JA2 installation (e.g. C:\Games\Jagged Alliance 2 Gold\)
4) Run the game. It may take a bit longer to start
5) Enjoy one of the best games ever in as high FPS as your hardware can handle

As I explained in the other thread I bumped just now, even after finding the exact right version of those files to even get the game to start, it still runs sluggish and laggy, just 10% less shitty than before.

Still looking for the ideal solution! I love this game, but never played UC before and like to get around to that now.

Disabling the intro got the game working for me, but even after trying all of these ideas, I still can't get it to recover after alt-tabbing to the desktop. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get alt-tab to work in Win8?

My old computer finally die on me so i bought a laptop, came with win 8...
Tried all the things above (and more), nothing worked (the game runs but was sluggish as hell).
Except if you select to play on windows mode, it works very well then but it is impossible to change the size of windows (you could however make it bigger by decreasing the resolution of your screen, still not great though)
So i decided to "draw the big gun" and i installed Visual Box, an emulator of older windows version.
And miracle it works perfect (and i'm running it from an average laptop).

Now installing Visual is not difficult but it take a bit of time.
More important you will also need to have a previous Windows 98/xp/7 installation CD, otherwise it doesn't work.
I was damn lucky to have an old windows xp installation cd...
No other way than the hard way